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British Columbians concerned about wild salmon have been nervously awaiting the final report from Bruce Cohen’s $25-million inquiry into the declines of Fraser River sockeye stocks.

Would it finally produce the smoking gun — fish farms; federal mismanagement; the aboriginal fishery; commercial overfishing; habitat degradation; pollution; changing ocean regimes — that various factions are convinced is largely to blame for the declines? Or would it be a whitewash?

As it turns out, it was neither.

First, on the evidence provided by 179 witnesses over 138 days of hearings, it concluded there is no smoking gun – no single simple cause that can be blamed for the consistent dwindling over two decades of a resource into which both Americans and Canadians have poured many millions in management and infrastructure.

“Appealing but improbable,” the report said in dismissing simple-minded explanations that are habitually presented to rationalize prejudices. In other words, it’s complicated, like the ecosystem itself, which surprised everyone with a historic return of 35 million salmon in 2010 then collapsed to 2.3 million in 2012. Singling out one factor for blame is just a way of evading the devilish reality with which we must deal.

Second, the report is no whitewash. It’s a bracingly direct commentary on the cascading effects of policy dictated by politics rather than science. Cohen pulls no punches regarding the successive governments that first politicized and then undermined the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which, in turn, lost sight of its science-based mandate and then mismanaged a crucial sustainable resource into its current state of crisis.

Yet even here, Cohen is even-handed, expressing satisfaction “that DFO’s front-line staff in the Pacific Region have done a creditable job in challenging circumstances.” The challenges arise from the federal department’s ability to recognize the problem at the top but its inability, for reasons political and bureaucratic, to implement in the field the policies it developed to address it.

“I call for action on two pivotal DFO policies that have yet to be fully implemented – the 1986 Habitat Policy and the 2005 Wild Salmon Policy,” Cohen said. It’s worth pointing out here that some of the key, front-line scientists responsible for that habitat policy were, in effect, hounded out of government because their advocacy for its principles fell afoul of politicians and top mandarins in Ottawa.

The Wild Salmon Policy was a major initiative that simply never achieved more than the lip service afforded a mission statement. Cohen calls on DFO to have a detailed plan for implementing the policy by the time the next generation of salmon emerges from the spawning gravel at the end of March 2013. The federal government should budget dedicated funding sufficient to carry out the plan and cover ongoing operational costs. And there should be annual progress reports.

One thinks this would be standard operating procedure in a well-run federal department but Cohen, at least, has put it squarely in the floodlights. Let’s hope the squabbling factions outside government can come together to ensure that it stays there.

The role of fish farms in the salmon controversy also earned his unblinking gaze — and deservedly so.

Critics have long argued that DFO’s mandate to both promote development of marine aquaculture while protecting wild salmon stocks puts its senior management in a grotesque structural conflict of interest – something like making the parks department responsible for promoting clearcut logging.

But the department’s mandate is clear, Cohen points out – conservation of wild salmon stocks – hence, the government should remove from DFO’s mandate the promotion of salmon farming as an industry and farmed salmon as a product. The department’s role should be as scientifically informed regulator, not commercial marketing shill.

Cohen urges a renewed effort to gather and analyze fish health data from farms on wild salmon migratory routes and says that data should be far more open than it has been, including being made available to non-government scientific researchers.

More importantly, he advocates for a strict precautionary principle in addressing the location of fish farms, something that has long been a cause celebre for environmental organizations.

For example, net-pen salmon farms in the Discovery Islands, which lie between Vancouver Island and the mainland at the north end of the Strait of Georgia, and are right on the outbound route of migrating Fraser River sockeye smolts should be rigorously evaluated.

Oft-vilified marine biologist and wild salmon campaigner Alexandra Morton seems vindicated here. She has argued that these farms are an epicentre for stressors that can adversely affect immature wild salmon as they pass.

Cohen says that unless these farms can be shown to pose no more than a minimal risk to migrating sockeye, they should be ordered by the federal government to cease operations.

Finally, Cohen offers one of those crucial reminders that seems self-evident but is often overlooked — the buck for all this stops on the federal minister’s desk.

Those concerned with the fate and future of wild fish will be mining the exhaustive report — three volumes and more than 1,000 pages — and the commissioner’s 75 pointed recommendations to Ottawa for months to come.

In the meantime, this is a democracy. In democracies, citizens have the final say. So those who care about B.C.’s sockeye salmon know where to take their concerns.

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